San Francisco, California
October 5, 2000

Dear Readers,

I received an email last week from Paul Horwitz, a friend and attorney who lives these days in Washington, D.C.; it read, simply, “Here’s your next letter writer.” An attached url sent me to a web site for a musician named Robbie Fulks.

Here’s what Paul meant: On Robbie’s web site, alongside pages where you can buy records and check tour dates (tomorrow night he’s at the Mucky Duck in Houston), there’s a feature called “My Day,” where Robbie writes for his fans regular dispatches from the life of a travelling troubador, circa 2000. I thought the most recent one, entitled “Audits and Heaven Too” was brilliant, and entirely open-letter-like, so I wrote Robbie and asked if we could reprint it here, and he wrote back and said yes.

Then I wrote Paul and asked him to tell me a bit about Robbie Fulks, since all I knew is what I’d read on Robbie’s web site. Paul replied:

He’s only got four albums. The one that made his name was his first, “Country Love Songs,” but I also quite like his newest collection of odds and ends, “The Very Best of Robbie Fulks,” which has excellent songs about Jean Arthur, and Debbie Peterson of the Bangles, and a fine song mocking people like me who are still alt-country fanatics.

I also sent a Fulks-related query to Jim Cox, who lives in Seattle and, like Paul, is still an alt-country fanatic. (Jim also contributed that great email about coincidences, the Pixies, and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” which I quoted at length at the end of an editor’s letterway back in June.) Jim wrote back:

Robbie is incredibly talented – a great singer, songwriter, and guitar player. He’s one of those guys who can do funny semi-novelty songs and then turn around and deliver a drop-dead stunning pop or country song. He’s a striking guy – about 6’5″ and really thin – and manic on stage.

Typical Robbie story is that he opened a show here in Seattle for Ben Folds Five about two years ago. Robbie went on at 7:15 in an all-ages venue and had a 25-minute set, plus the tickets were expensive and the show was sold out because the headliner had an MTV hit. We were bummed out that Robbie would be in Seattle but not really playing, so a friend of mine contacted his management and invited him and his band to Hattie’s Hat (a cool bar) to play a set later than night. So Robbie and his guys came over, set up, and played for nearly three hours for tips from about 50 of us. And he really seemed to have a good time doing it.

Robbie was a struggling songwriter in the Nashville machine, but nobody would record his songs because, often, they were too country. He did a greatinterview on Fresh Air about these frustrations, and it’s totally worth your time to listen to it.

An irony is that once Robbie broke out of that straitjacket and started making his own records, he moved steadily towards the pop-rock side of the alt.country tent. Anyway, print his letter.

Jim

In keeping with our (very) recent tradition of dividing long letters into two installments (like we did earlier this week with Ian Brown’s ingeniousdiscourse on Paradise Lost and lost paradises), we’re running the first halfof Robbie’s letter today, and the second half tomorrow. Though if you can’t stand the suspense, you can read the whole thing today.

Our official recommendation, as always, is to forget this web crap altogether andsubscribe to the weekly PDF version of Open Letters. It will arrive in your email box on Sunday morning, a mini-magazine with all the week’s contents, and more, laid out in two graceful columns; you will print it out, with minimal hassle; you will take it to the breakfast table, or the tub, or the back room at the Mucky Duck in Houston, and there you will read the words of Ian Brown, Robbie Fulks, and Greg Gransden, on paper. With a ballpoint pen, you will underline key passages (“Juggies!! Dance us out to commercial!”). In the margins, you will write “True!”

To subscribe, please send a blank email to weekly@openletters.net.

More tomorrow.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough